Hector Avalos: Who was the historical Jesus?

Christians all over the world will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday. That means you will see stories about "the historical Jesus" this month in the media.

Christians all over the world will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday. That means you will see stories about “the historical Jesus” this month in the media.

As opposed to the theologically constructed Jesus of most believers, “the historical Jesus” refers to the flesh-and-blood human being we can reconstruct on the basis of empirical historical evidence.

Thus, for historians in secular academia, Jesus cannot be shown to be the son of God or to have been resurrected from the dead on the basis of historical evidence. Those are claims of faith.

Secular historians of Jesus usually divide themselves into two camps that we can call “Jesus historicists” and “Jesus mythicists.”

Jesus historicists, which comprise the vast majority of such academic scholars, believe that there was a real person behind the stories in the New Testament, even if they don’t believe in any supernatural claims about him.

An exponent of Jesus historicism is Bart Ehrman, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of “Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth” (2012).

Jesus mythicists, on the other hand, believe that Jesus was a mythical figure or fictional literary character. Mythicists are a very small but growing group, and they include Robert Price, author of “The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems” (2011).

My own opinion, as an academic biblical scholar, is that there is not enough evidence to settle the question one way or the other. I am an agnostic about the existence of the historical Jesus.

A main problem continues to be the lack of documentation from the time of Jesus to establish his existence definitively. Jesus is supposed to have lived around the year 30. But there is no mention of him anywhere in any actual document from his own time or from the entire first century.

The best known stories about Jesus are the biblical gospels. Despite recent claims to the contrary, most biblical scholars recognize that none of the actual manuscripts of these gospels originated earlier than the second century.

The best efforts of textual scholars have failed to recover the so-called “originals” of any biblical text. Thus, it is difficult to know what has been added or subtracted from any original accounts.

Historicists often will reference the famous Annals of Tacitus, the Roman historian, for evidence of the existence of Jesus. However, even John P. Meier, author of “A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus” and a historicist, admits: “As with Josephus, so with Tacitus our observations must be tempered by the fact that the earliest manuscript of the Annals comes from the 11th century.”

Much was made of an ossuary (“a bone box”), first publicized in 2002, that mentioned a “James … brother of Jesus.” But charges of forgery and a subsequent trial did not eliminate questions of authenticity.

True enough, we cannot document the existence of most individuals who lived in the first century. So why should we expect documentation for Jesus?

But that absence of evidence is still curious because, when speaking of Christianity, the Bible says that “everywhere it is spoken against” (Acts 28:22, RSV). More traces should remain in the first century of a group that everyone was speaking against.

In favor of the historicists are the frequent allusions in the New Testament (e.g., Galatians 2:1-10) to “James, the brother of Jesus,” which seems to designate a particular person, and not just a follower of Jesus. It would be odd for a mythical character to have a brother who seems genuinely human.

On the other hand, 1 John 4:3 states: “Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God.” The rest of this biblical epistle suggests that there were other self-described Christians who did not believe that Jesus had come in the flesh.

If the existence of a real flesh-and-blood Jesus was so well established, why were there Christians who did not believe in such a flesh-and-blood Jesus in the first place?

Yes, unless some new dramatic evidence is raised, we are at an impasse, historically.

So, who was the historical Jesus? My honest answer is that I don’t know.

Hector Avalos is a professor of religious studies at Iowa State University.